The Premier League has warned fans not to post unofficial videos of goals online after thousands of goals were shared during the World Cup.

Through Vine, a popular video sharing service owned by Twitter, fans can upload unofficial clips of football action in an instant. A @FootballVines Twitter page has more than 539,000 followers. Fans may see the clips for free, although the quality can be poor.

The Premier League, however, has said it will clamp down on the unofficial videos when the football season starts on Saturday.

Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, said posting goal vines was illegal, as was sharing the videos on websites such as Twitter, and amounted to breaking copyright laws.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law," he told the BBC's Newsbeat programme. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity. I know it sounds as if we're killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property."

TV companies also have an interest in curbing the practice as they pay millions in rights to show games.

Sky Sport and BT Sport paid £3bn for the rights to show football to its subscribers and so they see football video sharing services as a threat. The Sun and the Times have also bought online rights and are keen not to have people able to see goal clips for free elsewhere.

"It's important to underline that it's illegal to do this, we've obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it, we've got legal teams talking with them about what we can do," Dean Scoggins from the Sun told the BBC.

Gareth Capon, chief executive at Grabyo, which lets companies grab, edit and share their own video clips across their website and other social channels in real time, said the problem faced by the Premier League is not uncommon and not Vine specific as consumers can record video on their phones and upload it to various social networks.

"We first saw this with music," he said. "There is consumer demand for football clips, people want to share them in real time and it's not an easy challenge to address. It's easy to shoot video of a game on a phone and post it on social media."

Capon said the trick for the Premier League and broadcasters was to come up with a high quality alternative and pointed to Netflix - the subscription service for streaming and DVDs - as an analogy.

"Netflix was a good commercial alternative to piracy and provided higher quality," said Capon.

Grabyo was used by the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club to make available real-time clips from the Wimbledon championships to share on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter instantly.

Adam Rendle, a copyright law specialist at Taylor Wessing, said any action taken against those in breach would probably depend on the scale of the infringement.

"If it is just you or I on a Saturday afternoon doing it every now and again, I think the tactic there would be to inform Twitter or Vine and get it taken down on an isolated basis," he said. "If there are serial "viners" who are setting up accounts to repeatedly do this every time there is a high-profile match and they have got thousands of followers so it's becoming an unofficial service of goals, they might seek to get the account blocked."

Twitter declined to comment but pointed to Vine rules which state that users "may not post content that violates the rights of a third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy and publicity rights".

The most recent figures show that Twitter received a total of 9,199 copyright takedown notices in the first six months of this year - a 38% increase compared with the second half of 2013. Material was removed in 76% of the cases.

Henna Riaz, an intellectual property lawyer at royalty auditing business 360 Audit, said the Premier League was being forced to tackle the issue in a public manner to demonstrate to its commercial partners that the issue is being taken seriously.

"I would imagine that the Premier League has had some stressful conversations with its commercial partners about the unauthorised use of this copyright," she said. "If the Premier League doesn't get control of the situation its commercial partners could be forced to renegotiate deals that are already on the table or may threaten to pull out all together."

A spokesman for one of the most popular football Vine accounts said: "The threat of legal action on the uploaders of these vines we believe to be a scare tactic as the reality of policing this is incredibly difficult. The only contact we have had regarding these videos is from press outlets.

"We have had no legal contact of any sort regarding any of our communication. In the event this should happen, we will of course adhere to any instruction or guidance given to us by the relevant authorities.

"At no point whatsoever do we, as a team, upload the Vines ourselves.

"They are sourced from others across the globe who are regularly uploading content to their Vine account. We are merely posting what we can find on the internet that we believe our audience will like. We do this for our love of the beautiful game, not profit."